Glass Houses
by belletylers
Summary: For those few golden hours between an orange grove and an airport runway, they had been suspended by their own belief in each other. That was six years ago. a tiva reunion fic set in s17


Glass Houses

In her life, Ziva had been in more fights than she could ever try to count. She had been beaten, shot at, chased, interrogated, tortured. She had defused bombs, for crying out loud. All with a clear head, with perfect, fine-tuned instinct and her trademark ninja-like precision.

But now, standing outside Tony's apartment door, she was nervous.

She was sure that if she could see her own chest, she would be able to see the very beating of her heart. She had been waiting years for this; it had brought her back from the edge of insanity a dozen times. And yet, she could not knock. She had become so accustomed to treading ground like it was made of glass, and she feared if she crossed this threshold, her very existence might shatter.

Ziva placed her thumb and forefinger over the pendant at her neck and took a deep breath. Her own hesitation scared her—in a fight, hesitation can get you killed. But this was no knife-fight. This was not hand-to-hand combat. This was Tony. She was about to see him. And he was about to see a ghost.

A wave of guilt surged through her, as it always did when she thought about him. And Tali. She reminded herself, as was her habit, of the pain and destruction that could have been caused had she not gone under three years ago. That morbid thought assuaged the aching in her gut. Almost.

She had imagined this moment a thousand times. Before she fell asleep, and when she woke up, and any spare moment in between. Or sometimes, she would imagine an alternate scenario; one where she had called Tony the second she found out she was pregnant. Or earlier—one where he succeeded in his pleas to get her to come home with him. One where Tali had gotten to grow up with more than one parent at a time. But as fantasies go, this was dangerous territory. In this other world, what does their life look like? Is Tony the amicable single father who takes Tali on the weekends? Or do they find a way to be…together? Would he still want her now? Could he? After all the times they had hurt each other (current circumstances notwithstanding)?

She could let her imagination run in circles until she exhausted herself wondering, but she knew how this scenario ended. It ended with Sahar knowing that Ziva had a family. Just more targets on more backs. That would have been a cost she could have beared to pay.

It was not what was on the other side of the door that made her anxious. No, this was what she had been clawing her way back to for all these years. The thing that scared her was everything in between. The physical distance—she had crossed continents for this, but the last few feet felt the hardest of all—but also the distance that time had put between them. Despite her strength of logic and her tendency to punish herself merely for wanting, she had lately found herself thinking of her last days with Tony. There had been moments in those few days where the heartache and the anxiety simply could not compete with how whole she had felt. How at peace. He had that effect on her, of immediate familiarity, of safety.

She had let herself give in, for a moment. For an afternoon. One of those afternoons that stretched on forever like they do in the height of summer. For however long it takes for two people to know each other the way that they did.

Had.

For those few golden hours between an orange grove and an airport runway, they had been suspended by their own belief in each other.

That long moment was the one she returned to in moments of weakness, of exhaustion and longing. She allowed herself to return to the roughness of his stubbled cheeks but the softness of his kisses, and his low, velvety murmurs in her ear, and the earthy taste of his skin.

If he never touched her again, she would not blame him. She would be heartbroken, but she would not blame him. There are only so many times you can mourn a person.

That was six years ago. And in half that time, she also been apart from Tali. When she thought of her daughter, she pictured her the way she remembered: small enough to carry, with big, soft cheeks and a vocabulary barely in the double digits. She would be five now. And Ziva had to remind herself that she was not starting where she left off, no matter how hard she wished she could.

But every second she stood out here in the hallway, Tali grew bigger and more distant. And it was that thought that made her finally lift her knuckles to the wood and knock.

The silence that followed made her feel sick. At first, she thought it was the anticipation and nerves making the seconds stretch out to feel hours-long. But they continued to pass, with no signs of life on the other side of the door. She resisted the instinctive urge to reach for a weapon concealed at her side and bust the thing down. But instead, she took a breath and knocked again.

But there was still nothing.

She had not planned for this. Through all the fighting, the sleepless nights, the danger and stress of the past few years, her mind had never conjured up a version of this moment where the door simply remained unanswered. To come this close and have to wait through another night alone seemed so cruelly unfair. The thought was unbearable.

The sound of the elevator doors opening pulled her out of her thoughts. She could hear footsteps and voices. Male ones. Both of which she recognised. Out of pure instinct, Ziva darted around the corner so she was out of sight, and listened, her fingers pressed up against the wall.

"You should've seen his face, Tony," said the first voice. "I've never seen someone go so pale at one of Gibbs' stares before."

"You would've if you'd looked in a mirror about fifteen years ago, McGee," said the second. That was Tony. Ziva's heart gave a leap. She closed her lips to prevent her breath from escaping audibly.

Ziva heard the jangling of keys and dared to peek around the corner. She saw Tony twisting the doorknob and swinging it open, and McGee standing behind him, holding two pizza boxes. Apparently, she had chosen to have her big reunion on Boys' Night. Picking her moment with extreme precision, she waited until Tony had stepped through the door. McGee was following behind, but spotted her and stopped dead in his tracks.

The exchange was wordless. The look she gave him was equal parts warning and pleading. He had unintentionally trespassed into a very precarious zone, and it would be best for everyone if he removed himself. She would make it up to him later.

"Hey, Tony," McGee said, slightly louder than necessary, and not taking his eyes from hers. "I, uh, I just realised I gotta go."

"Go?" came Tony's voice from inside the apartment, accompanied by footsteps. "But we just—" He appeared at the threshold only for Tim to shove the pizza boxes into Tony's arms and mumble something about work and something else resembling an apology before hurrying back down the hall towards the elevator.

"Tim! Tim!" Tony called after him. "McGee!" When it became apparent that McGee was not coming back, Tony nodded to no one, and stood by himself in the hallway for a moment. He was still holding the two boxes of pizza.

As Tony turned to go back into his apartment, alone this time, Ziva felt her feet carrying her out from her hiding place and into the dim light of the hallway.

"Tony," she said. There was little else she could think of.

It was as if the very sight of her possessed its own physical force, for when his eyes landed on hers for the first time in years, it seemed to knock the wind out of him.

She wanted to smile, to call out. She felt the sting of tears in her eyes. But she held it all back, waiting for him to react. But the silence was the reaction. And it was even worse than the one before. For a second, his eyes scanned her body; his gaze moved over her curls, to the necklace at her collarbone, all the way down to her worn leather boots. But only for a second. Then, he returned to her eyes, and there he stayed. Silent.

When she began to move towards him, it was like wading through water, like gravity had been dialled up ten notches. She stopped further than an arm's length away, feeling that this was a safe distance.

"Tony," she said again.

She saw his Adam's apple bob in his throat as he swallowed.

"Ziva," he finally said. It was a parched, dry whisper. His mouth and tongue began to form the beginnings of words, but each one would dry up before it could grow into a sentence. A tiny part of Ziva's brain felt a long-forgotten sense of satisfaction at rendering Anthony DiNozzo speechless, but she quickly muted that thought, saving it for a moment when the stakes were not so high and the dynamic not so very delicate.

"I am sure you have a lot of questions." She took another tentative step towards him. She almost could have touched him, now. But she resisted. "I have some questions too. And maybe some answers. Can you…can we talk?"

"_Talk_?" he echoed. "Ziva, you're…you're not…"

"You thought I was dead," she finished. A decade-younger version of them flashed before her eyes as she said that—both of them caked in dirt and sweat and staring down the barrel of near-certain death. Strangely, he had looked a lot calmer then. "You believed it." Something halted in her, then.

He scoffed, and finally found his words. "After three years, can you blame me?"

She couldn't. But after all those years of him finding her, especially when she did not want to be found, a part of her had grown accustomed to the chasing. When he did not come looking, it stung. She had figured he had mourned her one too many times by now, but that did not dull the sting. She blinked a tear out of her eye, staring now at the floor.

"I didn't believe it. Not at first. I did what I've always done, I came looking."

She looked up again, her lips parted slightly in surprise.

"I couldn't get rid of that gut feeling that something wasn't right. And that's a feeling I trusted more than anything. But I never found you." With the hand that was not holding the pizza boxes, he ran his fingers across his stubbly cheeks. "My therapist said that if I kept looking any more, kept obsessing over what I'd lost, then I'd never be able to process the grief. I'd never be able to be there for Tali, not like I was meant to. And I'd never be able to help her with her grief. So I stopped looking. Maybe too soon. But I did it for m—for our daughter."

His words hung in the air like fog, swirling around her head and clouding her thoughts. She did not know where to start. "You are seeing a therapist?" was the question she decided on first.

He avoided her eyes. "Pizza's getting cold." He cocked his head in the direction of the door. An invitation. One she gladly accepted.

The apartment she stepped into was barely recognisable. Ziva's eyes fell first, for some reason, on the coffee table in the centre of the living room. She remembered it as being stacked with take-out menus, magazines, DVD cases, and sometimes a bottle of scotch with a couple of glasses. Now, its flat surface had been covered end-to-end with a roll of butcher's paper, which had been adorned with colourful, childlike illustrations in crayon and pencil. Ziva could make out a rainbow, several trees, a sun, a house, bunches of flowers, what she believed was a horse, a kitty, and two human-like figures. One was small, with curly brown pigtails. The other was large, with short brown hair. Next to the figures, the words Tali and Abba had been printed in misshapen black letters. The second B in Abba appeared to have been added retroactively. Ziva smiled, feeling a surge of pride, accompanied again by the sting of tears.

She spotted next a pair of tiny shoes and socks, which had been discarded between the coffee table and the couch. The rest of the room was strewn with toys, stuffed animals, and books, which all looked strangely vibrant against the mostly monochrome décor of Tony's apartment. Against the opposite wall was a bookshelf, mostly filled with Tony's extensive DVD collection. But the second shelf from the bottom—right about at the height Tali would be—was empty aside from three framed photographs. Ziva crossed the room and stooped down a little to get a closer look. The picture on the left was of Tali with her father. She picked it up and ran her thumb over the little girl's face, which had become less rounded than she remembered. Her nose was bigger, her smile was gap-toothed and wide. Her curls had been drawn into a bun, though a few ringlets had fallen loose, and she wore what looked like a dancing costume. She was taller, though in the picture, not so tall that she couldn't be held in Tony's arms. The sight of them together, looking so happy, was enough to form a lump in her throat. She quickly put it back in its place on the shelf.

The second picture was of the two of them and Senior sitting on a picnic rug, and Ziva could not help but smile at the thought of Tony's father playing the role of the loving grandpa. The third picture she recognised, because it had once belonged to her. It was a picture of her and Tony atop a Vespa in Paris.

"She has gotten so big," Ziva said, her back to Tony. Her voice trembled slightly as she said it. She heard Tony's footsteps and turned, expecting him to approach her, but instead saw him walking towards the kitchen door. He reached out and ran his fingers over a series of pencil marks etched up the length of the door frame—a measurement of Tali's growth.

"Yeah, she has."

Ziva remembered the way McGee and Tony had arrived, remembered Tony fishing the keys out from his pocket. She felt the beginnings of panics in the endings of every nerve in her body. "Tony, where is she?"

"With Senior." He finally placed the pizza boxes down on the coffee table, careful to put them over where the paper was blank so as not to soil Tali's works of art. "Thursday night is sleepover with Grandpa. He takes her to her ballet lesson Friday mornings and then brings her home for lunch. Though, that'll have to change when she starts kindergarten in the fall…" He trailed off, realising that the detail was excessive.

Ziva was silent too. She suddenly felt the overwhelming sensation that she was a stranger here. She had wandered into a life that she was not a part of. Her heart sank hearing that Tali was not here, but one reunion was complicated enough. Maybe it would be easier this way.

"Are you…immortal or something?" Tony said abruptly. It had more of an edge to it than Ziva had been expecting and she was a little taken aback.

"Tony—"

"What the hell _happened_, Ziva?" His logic was beginning to recover from the shock of her now.

She shook her head. "It does not matter now."

"Doesn't _matter_? How can you even _think_ that that's true?"

"It is true." She started towards him. "It is true because it is over. Because everything I have done for the past three years has been to lead me back here. Back to my family. That is the only thing that matters now." She reached a close enough distance that she could feel his breath on her cheek.

He stared but did not speak. His breaths came out hot and close together.

"I know that it must have hurt. I know that you must have been furious with me for not telling you about Tali. Furious with me for dying. At the time, I thought I was doing what was right, letting you get on with your life. Not feeling obligated or tied down by…by someone who had resisted your help so many times."

"Ziva," he started, his voice steely with warning.

"Please. Let me explain. I have waited too long not to explain everything. I thought that I was doing the right thing. But grief, and trauma, and…" she found his eyes, "and heartbreak…they make you think strange things. Wrong things. I was wrong to do that to you. To not even give you the choice to be in Tali's life. But these past few years, I have had to live without her. I have had to know that she has been growing up, every day, without me. It has been the single greatest torture I have ever endured. And that is what I did to you by withholding the truth, and by sending her to you like that. And I will regret it every day for the rest of my life." She took one of his hands in both of hers and squeezed. "But," she went on, "I also know that had I told you about Tali sooner, then the threat to my life would have been a threat to all of us."

Only now did she get to really study his face. A face she knew so well, but one that had changed in the intervening years. His hair was longer; it flopped over his forehead a little now. The lines in his skin were etched a little deeper than she recalled, but his eyes were every bit as bright.

"I am so sorry, Tony," she went on. "I am sorry for all the times that I hurt you, and pulled away when you were trying to move close. I am sorry that you and Tali had to meet the way you did. I am sorry for the false grief I have caused. It is far more than my fair share. But everything I did since the explosion at my father's house was for your safety—both of your safety. That is why I did what I did. And now, it is over. All I want is to be with my family." Her voice faltered on the last word. He heard it, and some of the hardness in his face melted away. "I almost lost myself. More times than I can count. But the one thing that saved me from total destruction was the thought of what could be waiting on the other side of all this. Sometimes, I was not sure that the other side would ever come. But it has. And…"

And now she was here. And he was pulling his fingers free from hers and striding over to the couch, to sit with his head in his hands. The absence of his touch ached, but she had known that this would not be easy. It is true that bones are strongest in the places where they have broken, but it is also true that a cut to scar tissue will hurt far more than one to clean flesh. So which were they?

She followed him across the room, but instead of sitting beside him on the sofa, she kneeled in front of him on the floor, and waited. Waited for him to look at her, for him to speak. It seemed like a lifetime before he did.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, looking utterly exhausted. She did not blame him. But then a thought seemed to occur to him, and he looked up with a renewed alertness. "Does McGee know? Is that why he ran off?"

"McGee knows."

"And the others?"

"Gibbs. Jimmy and Ducky. Vance."

"_Vance_? Vance knew before I did?"

"I did not want them to know. I did not want anyone to know, in case they might get hurt. But things got out of hand. NCIS became…involved."

Tony clicked his tongue. "Of course they did."

"I could not risk the wrong people finding out about Tali, or you." Ziva could see the thick, rope-like muscles along the sides of Tony's neck.

"You think I couldn't protect us? You think I wouldn't have tried to help you? Badge or no badge, Ziva, I would've done whatever it took."

"That is exactly why I did not tell you." She found his hand again, and this time he did not pull away. "I know I am stubborn to a fault, and that I do not take help when it is offered to me." She thought of Adam, and the stash of medicine in the pocket of her cargo pants. "I have learned that refusing help is the weak thing to do, and I am trying to change. But I could not take the risk of something happening to either of you. For Tali to be hurt because of me. Or for something to happen to you, and for Tali to lose her father."

"Like she lost her mother?" There was still an edge to his voice—he must have heard it, too, because he closed his eyes and shook his head. It was Ziva who now separated their fingers.

"I have apologised for the hurt I caused," she said, keeping her voice careful and level. "Please do not make me feel any guiltier than I already do. I can assure you I am more than capable of beating myself up." She reached into her pocket and pulled out the wad of yellow pills, still wrapped crudely in a handkerchief, the way she had been given them. There were fewer of them now. She had been taking them, but only on the particularly unbearable days. "I used to be thick-skinned. I used to be able to hold everything inside. All the bad things that happened to me could live inside me and nobody would be able to see them. But then I had Tali, and it was like suddenly my heart was on the outside. And when I lost her, I lost part of myself. That part that had kept the door shut for so many years. Everything that I had kept inside for so long…started to come out. My nightmares came back—only worse this time, because whatever horror I had to relive, Tali would be there too. I would dream that I had to try and save her from the suicide bombing that killed my sister. That she saw me shoot my brother Ari in the skull and would not let me hold her; she was scared of me. That she was taken to Somalia with me and they tortured her just like they tortured me. I could hear her little screams inside my head, Tony. And then the nightmares started to happen during the day. I would get these awful visions and my body would just…shut down. And all I wanted in the world was to hold her. To keep her safe. But I knew that the safest thing was to stay away." She quickly stuffed the package back into her pocket and brushed one finger under her nose.

The muscles in Tony's jaw and temples twitched at the mention of her nightmares. He had caught her in the middle of one once—in this apartment, right after her father died. After Somalia, she would often come to work with particularly dark circles beneath her eyes, and though he never said anything, she knew that he noticed. He always noticed things like that.

She wondered what he was noticing now. The sweat on her brow? The tear tracks down her cheeks?

Tony's free hand reached out to her, and she thought for a moment that he was going to touch her face, but instead, he wrapped a lock of her hair around his fingers.

"Your hair's longer," he said, barely audible. "Darker." He studied the hair thoughtfully, but Ziva's eyes remained on his, and eventually his gaze came back to her. "I used to sit here, and wait for you to come home. For the world to be put back on its axis and for everything to make sense again. But this…this is like another dimension. The gravity's a little off. We aren't partners, we're just…people."

"We are…_parents_," she reminded him.

"Jesus Christ," he said in a low whisper, a smile ghosting over his lips. He let out a sigh, and slid carefully off the sofa and onto the floor beside her. He had his back up against it and his knees drawn close to his chest. "I don't know how to…exist. Here." He gestured to the space between them, what little was left. "Ziva, what exactly do you want?"

His voice was careful, tentative. Ziva thought about the wounds she was about to tear open, and considered a more delicate answer. But years of them tiptoeing around each other had gotten them little but heartache, and it was time to cast away the bandages and let the wounds finally breathe.

"What I want," she said, though with carefully paced, measured words, "is something permanent. I want a life that is mine. I want to feel safe. A home. Tali." She paused, swallowed. He had to know. He had to know that it was not just Tali she had come here for. "You."

She felt his breath rush out of his lungs as much as she saw his chest cave inwards, like he had been hit hard by an imaginary force. Underneath all the trauma and the mess, she was fighting her strongest instincts so she could be with him like this. Every word was a labour to form but a relief to speak, and she would do that labour a thousand times over if it would only bring him closer. She had spent years telling him one thing only for him to do the opposite—usually, the right thing. This time, she would be sure to say the right thing first.

"I know that it must not feel like it," she went on, "but all this time, I have been trying to do for you what you did for me again and again." She placed her shaking fingertips gently onto his cheek. "I have been fighting for you, Tony."

When she looked at him then, she saw everything. She saw the sparkle of mischief that had adorned his eyes so much when they were younger. She saw the hurt and heartbreak that lived behind it, not far beneath the surface, but far enough for most people to miss. Most. She saw the smiles he shot her behind Gibbs' back across the gap between their desks. She saw his dirty, sweat-caked face sitting across from her in Somalia, and his sleeping one on the bed beside her in Paris. And Berlin. And Israel. She felt her fingers across his stubbled cheeks in an orange grove, and saw the shine of tears in his eyes as they stood on the airport tarmac, the roar of a jet engine underscoring their goodbye.

Then she shut her eyes, and she saw nothing.

But she felt him come close, felt him shift his weight and position so he could wrap his arms around her and pull her close. One hand rested at the small of her back, and the other at the base of her neck, fingers tangled and face buried in her chestnut curls. She gripped back, clutching fistfuls of his shirt, and holding on tighter than she had ever before dared to. Breathing him in.

When he finally pulled back, he only did it to kiss her. It was a solemn, wanting sort of kiss—but nothing like their last. That one had been so aching, so hungry, so last-night-on-earth. This was not like that. He was gentle; they both were. So as not to so shatter the moment, in case it turned out to be a dream. A whimper escaped her involuntarily—whether from relief, pleasure, or exhaustion, she wasn't sure—and he only tightened his grip on her. Their breaths were shallow and hearts a-flutter at a moment neither of them had thought would ever come.

"Something permanent, huh?" he said, slightly breathlessly, while his fingers traced distracted circles on her shoulder blades.

"You are my family, Tony," she replied, with that uniquely Ziva smile that lit up her eyes more than her mouth. "That will never change. But the ball is in your corner."

He laughed, then. He couldn't help it. And he tucked a loose curl behind her ear just because he could before pulling back from her properly.

Ziva's eyes found Tali's discarded shoes beside her on the floor, the ones she had spotted when she came in. She picked up one and examined it. Objectively a small shoe, but so much bigger than the ones Tali used to wear. A sock had been stuffed inside it. When Ziva pulled it out, she saw it was decorated with dinosaurs.

"Tali likes dinosaurs?" she asked.

Tony looked ponderous. "Sometimes. Check the other sock."

Ziva did. That one had unicorns on it. She grinned at the sight of the tiny mis-matched socks in each of her hands. The kind of grin that flew through joy so fast that it ended up at heartache.

"She'll be home in the morning. It's late—think you can make it through one more night?" His voice was incredibly gentle now—she wondered if this is how he spoke to Tali.

She nodded but said nothing, still staring at the socks.

"Think you can make it through the night…_here_?"

She met his gaze and smiled. He smiled, too. They had gone about this journey without a map, and lost their way more times than most. They had retraced the same ground over and over, and found shortcuts through the woods that others had missed entirely. They had lost each other, for a long time. They were still lost, in a sense. They had no idea where in the world they were, but they were together.

"I'm starving," Tony said, suddenly. He reached forward to grab the one of the pizza boxes off the coffee table. He flipped open the lid and held it out to her. A peace offering. One she gladly accepted.

"_Todah_," she said, almost without thinking.

"_Prego_," he said, thinking very hard about a young Senior Field Agent and the Mossad Officer he had been tasked with tailing nearly fifteen years ago. She caught his eye.

"We will be okay." She did not have to say it, but she said it anyway.


End file.
